The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

When President Mark Hurd came to the New York Stock Exchange to ring the closing bell on July 30, he was asked why Oracle had decided to transfer its stock listing to the Big Board, the biggest such move in the 221-year history of the NYSE.

“We were excited by what’s going on at the exchange,” Hurd explained to CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo, in a conversation on ’s bustling exchange floor. (See the CNBC interview here.)

NYSE Euronext, which traces its roots to 1792 and has thrived through more than two centuries of change in the financial markets, is in the midst of its latest transformation, one that hinges on extreme performance powered by best-in-class technology infrastructure. The exchange processes over a million messages per second and billions of dollars in transactions each day, with latency measured in microseconds.

NYSE Euronext was formed through the 2007 merger of NYSE and Euronext, the latest in a long line of industry-changing business developments and technological breakthroughs over the years. The NYSE’s first merger occurred in 1869, when it combined with the Open Board of Brokers, ushering in the age of continuous stock trading, according to Steven Wheeler, NYSE Euronext’s Director of Archives, Corporate Giving and Responsibility. Prior to that, securities were traded on NYSE during twice-a-day call sessions.

In another bit of trivia, one of the NYSE’s first homes was the Tontine Coffee House at the corner of Wall and Water streets in lower Manhattan, according to Wheeler. And the exchange’s famous brass bell was originally a Chinese gong. Within the past few years, the historic exchange floor has been completely renovated into a next-generation "high-tech, high-touch" trading environment.

I mention all of this to illustrate just how dramatically the NYSE has changed, and how adaptation and reinvention are part of NYSE Euronext’s corporate culture. The company’s operations include NYSE Arca (a fully electronic exchange), ArcaEdge (an over-the-counter trading platform), NYSE Amex (which specializes in the listing of small-cap stocks), NYSE Bonds, and exchanges in Europe, as well as NYSE Liffe, its European derivatives business.

NYSE Euronext’s customers include leading global brokerage and financial institutions, which are known to be among the most sophisticated information technology users in the world and depend on the company to deliver products and services that support huge transactions that are completed in fractions of a second.

“We have some really extreme needs. It’s a combination of latency, throughput, high security, and high availability,” said Leibowitz.

A mutual interest in delivering on such high-pressure, high-performance requirements helps explain why NYSE Euronext and Oracle have become close partners. They’re tackling these challenges together. From a technology perspective, that’s manifested in two ways: within NYSE Euronext’s own mission-critical operations, and as products and services that NYSE Euronext offers its customers, including those outside the financial sector.

“We are in the commercial technology business ourselves,” said Leibowitz. “That makes us a very natural partner.” As signs of its progress, NYSE Euronext reported revenue of more than $100 million from information services and technology solutions in the second quarter of 2013, and NYSE Technologies was named “Best Data Center Provider to the Sell Side” by financial publisher Technology.

NYSE Euronext uses Oracle technology to manage and optimize its internal operations—in its trading and post-trade systems, risk systems, HR and other corporate systems, and web systems, according to Niederauer. Oracle helps NYSE Euronext “innovate on the fly,” he said. The company is looking to leverage its unique combination of market expertise and tech know-how into value-added capabilities it can share with customers.

It’s doing that through closer alignment with Oracle, whose enterprise software and engineered systems are widely used on Wall Street. “A lot of what we’ve been talking to Oracle about is, let’s prove the concept with us, then let’s find ways that we can help our customers collectively solve their problems,” said Leibowitz.

An Agile Enterprise

The partnership casts NYSE Euronext in the spotlight as a leading-edge technology implementer. “Our house is your house,” quipped Niederauer, in reference to NYSE Euronext’s high-profile role as a showcase for Oracle technologies.

NYSE Euronext’s investment in IT infrastructure has enabled the company to become smaller and more agile. In New York, NYSE Euronext employs approximately 800 people, about one-fifth of NYSE’s workforce prior to the 2007 merger. “We’re going to transform the place, but we’re going to do it enabled by technology,” explained Niederauer.

Other technology companies are gravitating to NYSE Euronext, too. In the first half of 2013, 14 tech companies listed initial public offerings at NYSE and NYSE MKT, raising $2.1 billion.

The picture that emerges is of a 200-year-old company that, in many respects, now acts more like an agile, fast-moving startup where new enterprise technologies are applied to drive innovation in an industry that itself is in the throes of fasten-your-seatbelt change.

That puts NYSE Euronext in the center of the action and helps explain why Oracle decided the time was right to list its stock there. Hurd summed it up this way: “When we thought about where we wanted to be, who we wanted to be aligned with, and how we wanted to be aligned, it made a lot of sense to do this on a number of fronts.”